Cannot print from Address Book! Print freezes and will not proceed.

Question

I want to print an address list for Christmas cards. When I select the Group, select all and select Print I get the option box. I then select my printer and use the down arrow to open the dialog box that shows I am printing from Address Book and gives the different forms I can use (ie list, label, envelope) as well as the fields to include in the list. Once I have everything selected I click the Print radio button. All of the information under the Address Book options line disappears. Print remains highlighted and my printer Que never opens or appears. If I manually open the printer there is no print job showing. At this point the Address Book application is frozen. I cannot select cancel on the print dialog box (I can click it, but it does not highlight and it does not close the dialog box! In order to get out of this situation I have had to close Address Book. The quit option on the menu does work and Force Quit is unnecessary.
I actually spoke with AppleCare on this issue on Friday 05 Dec 2008. The tech I spoke with knew of no other such situations, but when I started checking on this discussion page I see a posting from REECO from clear back on 24 Sept 2008. His posting can be found at http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8161605&tstart=0
The technician had me do several things. One was to pull my Caches folder out of my system Library folder. He also had me remove some Address Book preference items. The end result of these actions was a Mac Pro that would not boot! (The failure followed an Address Book crash with a "KERPROTECTIONFAILURE" and the message that some QualityMedia plugin might have created the problem!)(I could find no such plug in either on my system or via Google search!) The tech had asked me to boot to safe mode by booting while holding down the shift key untill the spinning gear appeared. The machine never progressed to a successful boot! I ended up having to use a 2nd hard drive and physically place it in internal slot 1 on my Mac Pro proceeding to reinstall Tiger! The bad news is that this did NOT solve my printing problem.
If I am attempting to print from a new install with just the Apple address card and the Owner's card in Address book the print proceeds fine. Once I import my data I am back to the same print failure.
Some diagnostic steps I have tried. I have tried USB local printers and bonjour printers. I have used Epson and Canon printers. I have tried to print to a PDF. I have tried printing from another computer (12 inch PowerBook) with identical results!
At this point I am going to call AppleCare Monday morning and see if anyone there has any more suggestions. Any suggestions this forum has will be received gratefully!

Answer 1

I was having the same crash or "just not print" problem as seen in other posts. I was able to fix it however, by making changes in some of the address cards I was going to print. By editing the "parent", "child", "spouse" fields which will get added to the name line of the label, I was able to get labels to print (or pdf preview) without difficulty.
I did not try and determine exactly what the problem was, but basically did a data cleanup. Since I didn't know that those fields would print, I had previously included information beyond just a name in the fields, like birthdates and such, eg. "Jimmy - 12/1/05". After either removing the fields entirely where I didn't really need them, or just cleaning them down to names only, they printed just fine. I'd considered trying to disable the feature entirely but the data cleanup was not hard for a dozen or so names.